Sunday, December 21, 2014

The movement to get men to stop hogging so much space in the subway by spreading their legs wide has made it to prime time - the New York Times has an article about it - and apparently the MTA is going to do a campaign about it:

Taking on manspreading for the first time, the authority is set to unveil public service ads that encourage men to share a little less of themselves in the city’s ever-crowded subways cars.The targets of the campaign, those men who spread their legs wide, into a sort of V-shaped slouch, effectively occupying two, sometimes even three, seats are not hard to find. Whether they will heed the new ads is another question.

I was calling it "mansitting" myself but whatever you call it, it is an obnoxious practice. And predictably, some men justify the practice on the grounds that their junk is so huge and delicate. Which inevitably lead to this tumblr:

Men defending their balls - a superpoem.The following is a crowdsourced poem, its lines excerpted from the messages of men writing in to defend their balls. Please read it as a continuous composition. The poem will be updated periodically. Thank you for your time.

Related to this justification is the notion that men don't/shouldn't/can't cross their legs. I was reading a bunch of comments on an article that the New Yorker posted to Facebook, about some right-wing French creep - here is the article on the New Yorker's site.

One of the Facebook comments critical of the right-wing creep was: Said the Frenchman who crosses his legs like a girl.